November 1st, 2012 issue #1144

In The Duellists, a French Hussar (Keith Carradine) insults a fellow soldier (Harvey Keitel) during the Napoleonic Wars. For years afterward, they engage in a series of brutal duels, driven by the injured party’s fanatical sense of honor.
The 1977 film marked a major star turn for Carradine, as well as the directorial debut of Ridley Scott, who went on to make the now-classic Blade Runner.

Some people recognize Matthew Lillard from Scream. Others know him from Scooby-Doo. Sitting in the airport in Dallas on the day he's talking to a reporter, someone tells him they just saw him in SLC Punk. One role in which he hasn't been recognized– yet– is as a director, and that's the one that's bringing him to Charlottesville.
The movie is Fat Kid Rules the World, and Lillard is candid about what brought him to direct the K.L. Going novel.

On the 25th anniversary of the Virginia Film Festival, Patricia Kluge and former Governor Gerald Baliles both are being honored for its founding. According to Kluge, however, someone else first floated the idea of a film festival in Charlottesville.

The curtain is getting ready to rise on the 25th Virginia Film Festival, and there's the recurrent problem: what to see?
Sometimes, it's simply too much to weed through more than 100 films for the optimal film festival experience. And festival director Jody Kielbasa takes a fiendish delight in forcing moviegoers to make the hard choices when two or more screenings you want to see are on at the same time.

In the mid-1980s, filmmaker Ross McElwee considered shooting a documentary about General Sherman’s march through the South. And he did shoot a documentary following Sherman’s trail, but in wholly unexpected ways. McElwee’s Sherman’s March became a droll account of his own romantic misfires, everyday upsets, and encounters with distinctly Southern characters.
The 1986 film’s intensely intimate style arose from McElwee’s one-man band approach. The participant in the upcoming Virginia Film Festival was the film’s protagonist, narrator, and entire crew.

For violinist Boyd Tinsley, it's always about the music– even when the medium is the movies.
In films like Star Wars, Psycho, and North by Northwest, the music creates the tension, says Tinsley. "That's what I love about them. I may not remember the plot. I listen from an emotional sense. I listen from the way I feel."
So when the Dave Matthews Band member decided to embark on making a film, the music came first.

Dan Mirvish is getting the check-engine light on his minivan checked in Los Angeles as he's speaking with a reporter, a seemingly mainstream activity for a filmmaker known as a subversive.
Mirvish co-founded the anarchic alternative to the Sundance Film Festival– Slamdance– after he and three other filmmakers weren't accepted at the Park City-based festival in 1995, and to this day Slamdance continues to share the same time and location with Sundance.

Actor Marc Singer’s roles have varied wildly. He has co-starred in period dramas like Roots: The New Generations. In TV’s V, he battled aliens. In the title role in The Beastmaster, he ruled the animal kingdom. And Singer, an avid Shakespeare aficionado, is particularly proud of his performance as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.